What is Your Citizenship Status? Racial and Citizenship Profiling by Law Enforcement along the U.S.-México Border (original) (raw)

The overall objective of this study is to examine citizenship profiling, or who is suspected of being undocumented and thus questioned about their citizenship status by law enforcement. To many, the answer to this question is “Mexican.” Statistically, an unauthorized immigrant, in most minds, is Mexican (Provine et al., 2016), although that raises questions of what constitutes the “Mexican” phenotype. Despite such perceptions, Heyman (2014:111) reminded us that “illegality is not simply a state of being, but rather a matter of social-political construction and struggle.” In sum, our primary data was designed to conduct a multilevel analysis on citizenship profiling along the U.S.- México border that allowed for an investigation of individual and neighborhood effects. To date, we have gained important insights on the implications of policing immigration at the individual-level from qualitative and policy analyses that revealed an array of negative consequences including racial profiling and criminalization of Latina/os (Heyman, 2010; Kennis, 2011; Longazel, 2013; Provine et al., 2016; Provine and Sanchez, 2011; Saenz et al., 2011), removal and deportation (Armenta, 2016; Provine et al., 2016; Golash-Boza, 2012; Motomura, 2011), and compromising community policing efforts (Nygun and Gill, 2016). At the neighborhood-level there has been less attention given to the policing of immigration. An important exception is Mary Romero’s (2006) analysis of the Chandler Roundups in Arizona who found residents of Latina/o neighborhoods being disproportionately targeted. We contribute to this scholarship by establishing that first- and second-generation individuals and those who reside in neighborhoods characterized by poverty and mid-level of enclavishness are disproportionately questioned about their citizenship status by law enforcement.